The reasons I can't quite bring myself to give this book top marks basically boil down to how even the best anthology is never quite as coherent as a straight narrative will be, and that this isn't quite as fresh a take as I hoped. I suspect that it's been in circulation long enough, and I've done enough related reading in that period, that the findings of the contributors have influenced those books. That I finally got to this work (it's been on various "to-read" lists since it was published) was due to a passing comment by the novelist Rebecca Kuang that this was one of the works she found most useful in her education.

For the average reader of history this will be a serious jag to their expectations. If they are aware of China's war with Japan at all, they will have probably learned about it through the prism of Barbara Tuchman's biography of "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, and have picked up the dismissive opinion of the Nationalist war effort. This book is anything but dismissive of that effort, but the participants are collectively critical of Tokyo's rudimentary sense of strategy. I read this as an inter-library loan but I'm feeling like I actually have to own a copy. ( )